Children of Men is a nativity story for the ages, this or any other.

A little bit of "Crime and Punishment" and a whole lot of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," Revanche, the Austrian candidate for last year's Best Foreign Language Film, is a surprisingly unruffled tale of love, thievery, murder and revenge.

Kaurismaki is a master at infusing his movies with apparently contradictory qualities. The best of them -- and The Man Without a Past is surely that -- are hard to describe precisely because they seem to exist, to balance precariously, in the tension between opposites.

Even by his stylistic standards, Anderson has cranked up the artifice.

Before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen.

We don't get a good look at a painting until 35 minutes into the film biography of Séraphine de Senlis, the early 20th-century French painter discovered by German art collector Wilhelm Uhde. The film Séraphine is not about paintings.

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]

A worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance.

For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.

An efficient, cold-blooded sci-fi splatter movie that never makes the mistake of forgetting that on some level it is deeply ridiculous.

So is this a Western take on Africa? Yes, but Rebelle is full of such careful detail, and is carried so beautifully by Mwanza’s performance, that questions of authenticity slide away.

As confusing, horrific and unsettling as a nightmare can be, at least you wake up and the memory fades. Darwin's Nightmare, tragically, is not a dream, but rather a haunting, beautifully made reality check well worth waking up to.

The acting throughout is exceptional, rooted in observed realism, but suggestive of more mythical agents at work through the lives of human beings.

Guy and Madeline is a decidedly modern film, whose frightened, impulsive, charming characters could walk into our lives tomorrow.

It is filmmaker Assayas who is the star here. France's most important contemporary director has created a work of almost magisterial calm.

Trier's all in a calendar-day conceit gives Oslo, August 31a clean, clear structure, and yet it doesn't hem it in.

Looper ups the ante like a poker player on speed. What a potpourri of genres we have here – noir again, but sci-fi too, and action and horror and psycho-drama with existential trimmings, the latter designed to invite the thinking viewer into the fray.

A precise, subtle and emotionally affecting portrait of the fraying friendship between two men, director Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is an increasingly rare sort of American independent film: It aspires to be something other than a Hollywood movie with less money.

He gets much of what he wants, but not all of it, and not all of the time - the film is just too eclectic on occasion, a bit jumpy in its tone and its pacing.

Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.

As down-to-earth as a ghost story gets.

The plot is squeezed dry in this bloody Valentine from Hollywood and becomes annoyingly predictable. Thriller stumbles on its own success

Heartwarming, tragic and, at times, hilariously funny drama.

The problem is not that the director is working but that his latest film is working too hard. Way too hard – this thing is melodrama running a marathon.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

The freestyle approach is an apt fit with the freestyle, spontaneous comedy, as both the playful director and affable star capture moments on the fly.

The result is a rarity on the modern screen -- a film with more brains than heart.

In the end, the spectacular martial-arts epic seems to signify nothing much more than its own beauty, as brilliant and ephemeral as a fireworks display.